[tug-summer-of-code] Extension of Unicode capabilities

J.Fine J.Fine at open.ac.uk
Tue Apr 1 07:39:34 CEST 2008


Hello Sean

Nice to hear you're interested in this problem.  I'd like to mention a detail to you - namely that you've followed someone else's mistake.

You wrote: "I would like to work on improving Unicode compliance within TeX"

Donald Knuth wrote TeX the typesetting program, and when he froze TeX in 1990 (yes, that long ago) he stated very clearly that did not want the term TeX to be used to refer to programs that were incompatible with the program he wrote.

Knuth's statement is available at:  http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb11-4/tb30knut.pdf

Please instead write something like "Unicode compliance within TeX extensions".

The call on http://www.tug.org/gsoc writes of "interesting addition to TeX", when it should have said extension, and I expect that your error was simply following this non-compliance with Donald Knuth's wishes.  Let's be perfectly clear about this:  the project is about improving programs that are not called TeX, and which Knuth does not wish us to call TeX.

Anyway, that detail aside, good luck with your project proposal.

-- 
Jonathan (Mentor for mathtran-javascript)

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